Shopify/Shopify Plus analysis through the eyes of AbleSense, Lucid Fusion, and Growth PART 1: The Shopify Community

Shopify/Shopify Plus analysis through the eyes of AbleSense, Lucid Fusion, and Growth Spark. Part 1: The Shopify Community and experiences with Shopify support

Thursday, July 12, 2018Lauren Macdonald
The eCommerce landscape is everchanging. The emergence of new and exciting technologies/ apps can often make it difficult to find what new avenues are best for business. So how can you decide which route is best for you? It really all starts with the Platform. One platform that many of the web agencies we come across love to work with is Shopify/Shopify Plus

Being the Partner Manager at eBridge Connections, I have the pleasure of working with some of the best in the business when it comes to companies that build Shopify and Shopify Plus websites and extensions for their clients. I decided to interview a few of them and compile their insights into a 3 Part blog series to help shed some light on what makes Shopify/Shopify Plus their eCommerce platform of choice.

In Part 1 we’ll be sitting down with our friends at AbleSense (Aaron Whitman/ Jeff Harper), Lucid Fusion (Zubin Mowlavi), and GrowthSpark (Ross Beyler), to dive deeper into what they like most about the Shopify community and their experiences dealing with Shopify’s support team. Enjoy!

The Community:

Having a supportive community of Partners can be vital to seller success. Can you talk about your experience with the Shopify Community?

AbleSense

“The Shopify community is a diverse ecosystem of merchants, experts, and app developers. Through hosting our own Shopify meetups, we’ve managed to bring the entire community together to network and share ideas. One feeds the other – merchant needs can become the genesis of the next app, and experts can help give seasoned advice to merchants.”

Lucid Fusion

“The Shopify community is unparalleled in terms of their support for one another. There is a collective desire to help entrepreneurs build and grow that trickles down from the team at Shopify. While there is healthy competition within the community, it feels far more united in its desire to collectively enhance commerce.”

GrowthSpark

“One of the reasons why Shopify has been so successful is because of their robust community and ecosystem, which allows them to support their users at a level that isn’t possible with other systems. Whether you’re looking for a new strategy or you need help implementing a tool, there’s almost definitely a blog, article, or forum discussion about it.

For sellers specifically, there’s such a wide array of qualified vendors, which means that you can easily get a second opinion, or just discussion the possibilities, no matter what challenge you’re facing or what capability you’re looking for. Shopify itself also puts out great content, which covers solutions, strategy, and even tips to bring your store to the next level.

The Shopify community really sets itself apart in that there are so many high quality contributors, they can actually offer both quantity and quality in the resources they offer sellers.”

The Support:

A solid, helpful, and responsive support team can be a make or break feature for many sellers. How have you and your clients found Shopify Support in times of need?

AbleSense

“We love to provide hands-on support for our customers on our projects, but after launch it is nice to know there is a huge, knowledgeable team merchants can reach out to 24/7 if they need help on any issues. Fortunately, it’s very rare that they ever have to, as the system is very reliable.”

Lucid Fusion

“The Shopify Plus solution engineers, launch managers and support team members are unique in that they are equally experienced with the platform and technical enough to address some very complex questions.”

GrowthSpark

“Half of Shopify’s staff is ‘Support Gurus,” or about two thousand that are spread globally - and available 24/7. Any way you want to get in touch with Shopify, the can do, whenever you want, and that’s a huge differentiator for them. What’s nice too is that they offer different levels of support:

First time users can talk to basic support reps to get started; existing merchants on Shopify+ have dedicated support reps that they can talk to any time. As a Shopify Partner, we have our own team that we can work with. They have resources for every level of relationship, and for seemingly every need.

They’ve also done a great job with documentation. It’s easy to search and find exactly what you need, and they’ve invested heavily in the support docs and platforms. Their resources range from overall strategies to granular how-to guides.

Lastly, there are also over 100,000 groups for Shopify sellers. In addition to pages hosted by Shopify, there are also countless Slack channels, Reddit groups, LinkedIn pages; another testament to the fact that Shopify will support you wherever, however, and whenever you prefer.

For us specifically, as a Shopify Partner, our relationship with support is sophisticated and quite close. Whenever we have an issue, we’re able to escalate and our team has been great about putting us in touch directly with developers or whoever is the best fit to solve the problem we were experiencing.”

And there you have it! Thanks again to the folks at AbleSense, Lucid Fusion, and Growth Spark for sharing their insights on the Shopify community and their support. Stay tuned for Part 2 coming next week, where we continue our Shopify/Shopify Plus analysis with a look at the platform itself and its scalability according to the agencies.

Marc Darmon, Partner Manager, eBridge Connections

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A big thank you to our contributors in this series! Find out more about each company via the links below:

“Integration has saved us at least 10 hours a week on just the fulfillment side. This new process has helped streamline the way our orders are inputted into Sage 100, and our team couldn’t be happier with the automation.
”

Kyle Brandt, Wilson Electronics

“Life at Char-Griller is better now with eBridge integration.”

Nicholas Williams, Char-Griller

“If your business is at a point where you are doing a lot of manual data entry and you need automate processes, I would definitely recommend looking at eBridge Connections. Now that we have an integration solution in place, I can’t imagine operating without it.”

Eric Marquardt, LifeCORE Fitness

“So far so good. We are happy to see this [ShipStation integration] process up and running.”

Jason Barnell, DroneNerds

“eBridge's team understood what we needed and helped us every step of the way. They were always available for whatever we needed as we developed our new systems and helped bring us from idea to implementation to real world application. I would like to say thank you to the entire eBridge family for all the time and effort they put in to help us achieve our goals and highly recommend them to any business that sells online.”